Managing modern networked systems and applications is daunting because infrastructure is complex and things can go wrong in so many parts of the technology stack -- servers, storage, network devices, applications, hypervisors, APIs, DNS, etc. How can you address the challenge?

A good place to start: problems that can solve themselves, should.

This is called “self-healing” in the systems management space. As our systems are increasingly virtualized, the opportunity to have our systems work around and self-correct issues has grown greatly in recent years.

The simplest example of self-healing is automatically restarting a service or process that stops or otherwise becomes unresponsive. It is important to keep in mind that this is a workaround and that automated activity of all sorts needs to be logged and monitored, in turn. If an application leaks memory such that it needs to be automatically restarted several times a day, that restart is not the fix, it’s a Band-Aid that is mitigating the impact while the developers responsible fix the application.

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